Visitation Rites
Dee Dee Chapman
Hot dogs blackened on metal hangers
in a front-yard fire pit.
Sandstorms that interfere
with the basketball playoffs.
His garden and our holes,
hollowed
to house wolf-girls
or volcanoes.
Flies on the glass eyes of humble cows,
dirty diapers,
cheap donuts earned with
dishes washed, bibles read,
the radio bellowing gospel,
the taste of powdered copper
in the wind in Arizona,
our Augusts quenched by 25-cent sodas,
10-cent candies,
McDonald’s pancakes
and Dollar Store crossbows.
I don’t remember my father's arms,
only the scratch of his whiskers against my face,
his lisp over the phone.
I remember a nine-year-old with a photograph,
a 10-year-old
with the blue-black, cackling soothsayer
of a magic eight ball
bubbling up with,
"Concentrate,
and try again."
Dee Dee Chapman studies Creative Writing at Western Washington University. She has been published in From Bellingham With Love, Yellow Chair Review and Jeopardy Magazine. In September 2014 she published her first chapbook, Colluvium. Bellingham has been her home for seven years, the longest she's stayed in one place. She is a cinephile and her favorite animal is the prehistoric Megalodon shark.